not bad ~ Asus 8800GTX ~

[ShEpRON]

Hey hey all. I finally got my new shiny Asus geforce 8800GTX yesterday, and i spent the whole night last night with hammer and saw, trying to "reconfigure" my CASE. haha. however after hours of blood sweat and tears. i managed to flip the switch and boot up. i must admit, the picture looked exactly like it di with my "old" geforce 7800GTX... so i was not impressed. .. .. . .

JOKES!!!

ok, really i loaded 3dmark06 that comes with the asus bundle software and ran some test. with my 7800 GTX, i cracked a 4077 score. which i thought was not to shabby. then i cleared my system from drivers and did all the nesisaries, and loaded up with "the monster" 8800GTX. with the new 8800 drivers, i miss the old interface and normaly you could switch between them, but for some reason you can with the new drivers.. ANYWAY! i ran 3dmark again and cracked a score of 6559. now i thought. this isnt a "fenominal score" and i am curiouse as to why my score would be, less than double that of me old card. but hey. benchies suck anyway, and its a sure way to make you depressed when youve just shelled out .. im my case a couple grand... (South African Rands).

So i played some games, once again, the new ghost recon was bundled with the 8800GTX, so i loaded it an...... (this is my jaw dropping).. ive got an old monitor and its max res is 1280 x 1024 ... So i cranked it up to 16x AS filtering and ... believe it or not, 8x AA and set everything to MAX. OMG!!! is all i can say. the graphics the graphics, the wonderful graphics!! not once did it stutter, or even flicker. hehe, thats performance. but now totally in awe, i thought, maybe ghost recon isnt such a "intensive" title, so i loaded, Heroes of Might and Magic, Company of Heroes, and Titan Quest. Gentilmen and Ladies. i want to tell you, there is no better feeling in the world than when in EVERY game you play, you crank up the res and the settings to MAX and you play in what appears to be a seamless world of fast flowing frame rates!!!. I am so happy with my purchase.

I would still like to know why my 3dmark06 score is so low though so here are my specs

Intel prescot 3.0gig bumped to 3.22gig
1gig of ddr 400 ram 2 x 512
one random motherboard, old as hell, one of the first 16x pci ex slot to come out. only one of them....
a dvdrom and a 80gig hdd both IDE and running off the same cable/ribbon, haha, with the dvd rom as master and the hdd as slave..?
what else, oh and a Asus GeForce 8800GTX PCI Ex card.
Oh and a 750 wat thermaltake psu...

PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU ALL THINK?
3DMARK06 Score ~
Actual Game performance !!!!!
Should i upgrade?

 

[bullaRh]

Should i upgrade? <~ u probably have 2 upgrade if u wanna play crysis and stuff, i think its pretty cpu intensive. but check out what other people get in 3dmark06 on the webpage

 

[lambofgode3x]

I would still like to know why my 3dmark06 score is so low though so here are my specs

Intel prescot 3.0gig bumped to 3.22gig
1gig of ddr 400 ram 2 x 512
one random motherboard, old as hell, one of the first 16x pci ex slot to come out. only one of them....
a dvdrom and a 80gig hdd both IDE and running off the same cable/ribbon, haha, with the dvd rom as master and the hdd as slave..?
what else, oh and a Asus GeForce 8800GTX PCI Ex card.
Oh and a 750 wat thermaltake psu...

PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU ALL THINK?
3DMARK06 Score ~
Actual Game performance !!!!!
Should i upgrade?

rather than me tearing apart your system specs, ill make this short and simple (hopefully). ok, the 8800gtx needs a good processor in order to prevent cpu bottlenecking. set your hdd to primary and your cd drive to slave. memory is fine...ish.

upgrading? eh...not right now. save your money and wait untill amd releases their answer to the core 2 duo and the quad core (summer of 07). if amd fails, then go core 2 duo e6600, the evga nforce 680 sli, 2 gigs of ram, and a 74 gig raptor harddrive. this will push your card even further.

the reason you are getting a crappy score in 3d mark 06 is because that benchmark depends heavily on memory and cpu.

 

[Nova46]

Your CPU is definitely holding your score back, and also another GB of ram would help a lot. A new motherboard would probably help a bit too. More than anything else though I would get a new monitor. My 3dmark06 score is umm around 10k, 11.5k if I overclock to 3.6 Ghz.

As to if you should upgrade or not, it's up to you. Are you satisfied with how fast your system is? Benchmarks are just testing programs, if your computer seems fast to you and plays games up to your standards then there is no need to upgrade.

 

[Fulmar]

Like everyone else has said - bottleneck in your cpu and more ram is needed.

 

[krisz]

then i cleared my system from drivers and did all the nesisaries, and loaded up with "the monster" 8800GTX. with the new 8800 drivers,

What did you use to clear your old drivers off? I just got my 8800 last week and i had a 7800GTX before. Since i installed the new card i am having trouble with my LCD screen. It looks like it is flickering and shuts down then turn on again. The screen is kind of jumps up and down. I called Viewsonic and they gave me an RMA number but i don't feel like sending my screen away and maybe the problem is in my computer.
Does anyone has any experience with that kind of the problem?

I did not uninstalled the old drivers just installed the new ones on top.

 

[quantumsheep]

Bottlenecks are fairly obviously that CPU and 1gb of RAM. Up the CPU to at least an E6300 Core 2 and get another 1gb of RAM, then you'll be scoring around 9,000 in 06!

 

[ShEpRON]

Yeah, thats my first priority, ive ordered a viewsonic 22" LCD 5ms and great picture quality. so i hope ill be blown away with that. So your 3dmark06 score reaches 10k? thats a hell of alot more than what im getting. sh!t. thats good news. but before i go spend more G's on mobo, cpu, ram. can someone tell me their thoughts on PCI Ex 2.0 and whether or not i should wait till that comes out on the new mobos?.... anyone got info on that? release dates? specs?

 

[ShEpRON]

KrisZ

My system was a relatively new formated one. so all i really did, was before unplugging my 7800, i removed the drivers from add and remove programs. and then shut down. then put the 8800 in and when windows booted up, it wanted to install new hardware, i clicked cancel. and then loaded the latest drivers manually. i also reinstalled my monitors drivers.... i dont know if that would help. i did it because i had just formated.

 

[mpjesse]

some advice:

don't listen to what everyone says in this forum. more RAM isn't going to improve your score by much (if any!). a better CPU will for sure, but 3dmark isn't an accurate representation of most 3D games.

so don't fret over 3mark06 scores... they're 75% bullshi*t anyways. and if that's all you really care about... well... then... you're an idiot and you've just wasted $650.

 

[ShEpRON]

Thanks man. thats the way i felt. like i said in my original post, benchies are a sure way to make one depressed. but yeah my games are running smother than... well. smooth. i LOVE this CARD!!! took me so long to build up the balls to spend so much money on a sigle component. but what component. Thanks guys. any news on the PCI ex 2 slots, what effect will that have on my card? when i get a new mobo, should i get 680i or wait for the new boards with pci ex 2 to come out?

 

[mpjesse]

PCI-E 2.0 isn't going to do crap for video cards right now... unless the spec somehow lowers latecy, which is appears it won't. I believe all PCI-E 2.0 is going to do is double x16 bandwidth to x32, which is not needed and probably won't be for another 2 years. Still, it's nice to know they're actively working on a successor. AGP lasted waaaay too long.

So to answer your question, don't wait for it.

And yeah, I don't regret getting a 8800 GTX either. All my games run >30fps at 1600x1200 w/ max settings. Quake 4 sure is nice at that res! ;-)